A little introduction…

I’m John, call-sign: Guppy. I’m not a real fighter pilot, though like many of you, I like to throw on a flight suit and run around the house to Danger Zone (maybe that’s just me). Instead I find myself in quite an elaborate “simpit” chair-forcing the hell out of the digital skies.

I’ve been playing flight sims as long as I can remember; Janes in the 90s, a bunch of others (I have vivid memories of an A10 tank buster sim), LOMAC, FSX and now DCS. Along with DCS I build scale models of planes, ships and tanks. There’s a lot more about me, but this blog is not a personal ad in a newspaper; or for you younger generations, Tinder.

This blog will serve as a loose guide to the decisions and process I went through in building my simpit. It will not be a set of instructions, but will hopefully be a place of inspiration. I will post the gear I use so that it will help you determine what might work for you. The first couple of posts will likely be displaying some of my older setups and the rationale to get where I am at today. Speaking of where I’m at today, my simpit is off to my right and I often look at it thinking, “how the hell did I build this”; this blog should answer that question.

Along with my simpit, you might find some posts of me building scale models. I’m going to try to separate those two, but I’ve yet to figure out how to do that. So until I do, this will be primarily for my simpit.

My hope is that this post will be the wordiest of all of my posts. My wife and my ex-english-teacher-now-close-friend will both tell you I’m a terrible writer. Guppy bash keyboard – Guppy make word good. So to your benefit, I plan to use more bullets and quick details than wordy paragraphs about how the temperature change and leaves falling of autumn has inspired me to make chili (for those ridiculous cooking bloggers – hate them… give me the damn recipe!).

To end this already-too-long post, I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures that shows where I came from and where I am at today.

Guppy, Out.

This would be some time 2005 – likely before logging in to fly with the 169th Panthers. ~2015? Getting closer! I went through a hiatus with DCS, for a bit, and started playing the HELL out of Elite Dangerous. Ran with this for about 6 months in 2018 while I worked through my final design. Today! This was before I rewired my HGU55p helmet. I plan to detail that as well.

In the name = _(‘Test Name’); section of the LUA file name this something that is distinguishable IE: “EXPORTS” or whatever makes sense to you. Make sure you put the file in your :\DCS World Open Beta (or just DCS WOrld)\Config\MonitorSetup folder